Here’s how old I am: I am old enough to remember when Time’s December publicity event was called Man of the Year. The machine started early with the possible short-listers leaked for speculation, and finally: THE MAN OF THE YEAR. Ronald Reagan. Ted Turner. Anwar Sadat. And so on.

Now that I think of it, there were occasional women of the year. Wikipedia — for the purposes of this trivia, let’s call it an unimpeachable source — tells us Wallis Simpson won in 1936, her step-niece Elizabeth II in 1952. But it’s basically a man’s game, even if the whole thing was changed to Person of the Year in 1999.

I was amused, today, to see Twitter light up with the news Pope Francis was this year’s PoY, a few days after the story was floated that the finalists included Miley Cyrus. Great work, Time! Flogging a few seconds of the hive’s attention away from whatever it had been paying attention to a few seconds earlier, and then? The big reveal! A pope! Leap into action, Twitter!

I think what’s happening here is a reflection of something Hank put his finger on a while back: The web still isn’t real enough. Ask yourself why the college newspaper still exists. It serves a generation that’s been online since they were toddlers, digital natives. These should have been the first print publications to fall, and yet? They haven’t.

To quote Don Draper, who saw plenty of Men of the Year: You can’t frame a phone call. How will we know who Salon named the 100 Greatest Hacks of 2000-whatever? Just thinking of the search gymnastics needed to find that in 2023 makes my head hurt, but Time — there will always be a Time, on microfilm in some library, somewhere.

With its obvious, safe, not particularly interesting Person of the Year story. Now Miley — that would have been newsworthy.

How y’all today? I just realized I’ll be having some sick days coming up. My cataract surgery is a week from now, followed by a sedate period of lying-in to sleep off the anesthesia. And with that, I close a little over six months of eye nuisance. I had the first surgery close to the longest day of the year and the second on about the shortest.

I just want to drive at night again.

Bloggage?

14 things people in Florida used a machete for in 2013. For reals.

Twelve stories of very bad Santas. The worst one we ever encountered was actually just baby Kate’s experience — my babysitter took Kate and her own two to Southtown Mall in Fort Wayne, thinking to miss the crowds at Glenbrook. What they found was a booze-stinking Santa who told all the kids gimme five, holding out a dirty glove.

The FDA is “taking steps” to “phase out” antibiotic use in livestock. I’ll believe it when I see it.

How to talk to Republican senators: A guide for women.

Over the hump. I think.

I ran into someone at the Eastern Market Saturday, who told me he’d been to Mitch Albom’s miracle event, at which the pint-size pundit laid hands on the thorny and ageless human problem of racism and healed it, healed it I say promoted his new book.

“You know, I like to think I’m pretty good at self-promotion,” he said. “But after that, I’d have to say I’m at maybe a bachelor’s degree level, and Albom has a couple of doctorates.”

The evening wasn’t a total waste, he added, as the admission price included an autographed copy of the Oracle’s new book, just in time for holiday regifting.

All of which was good to know when I read Sunday’s Mitch blurtage, which was, as usual, lazy and phoned-in and dumb in places it wasn’t actually wrong. It was about the Renisha McBride case, and contained the patented repeating-phrase trick. Mitch advises us all not to draw conclusions about the man who shot McBride, because “we don’t know” what happened. All true enough, but it’s incredibly annoying for this guy, who can barely rouse himself to report on sports, much less current affairs, to tell us “we don’t know” when he’s a virtual human shrine to knowing nothing.

Oh, well. Enough of that. It was a long weekend and a tiring one. Kate’s and Alan’s birthday was Saturday, so it was shop/cook/bake from dawn to well past dusk. Cake was prepared and enjoyed. Every morning errand took longer than it should have. I caught every red light, was helped last in every line, picked the wrong checkout, the usual. But at the end of the day? Chocolate frosting.

Now it’s Sunday, the wind is howling and I’m charging all my devices, as we’re told to expect power outages. I feel covered with a layer of grit, probably because I am — an early chore today was mulching a shitload of leaves to spread over our bare backyard topsoil. About a third of it tracked back into the house on our feet; I sincerely hope once it’s wet down thoroughly and starts to go back into the earth, this problem will abate. This is one winter we’ll be spending with gardening books, as we have a whole blank canvas to sketch.

Among the other activities: Watched “Flight,” not as bad as some of last year’s reviews led me to believe, but not great, either. The early plane crash scene is one of the greats. I think I’ve seen three movie plane crashes that made me reconsider flying altogether, and Robert Zemeckis directed two of them — this, and “Cast Away,” of course. The third was “Fearless” with Jeff Bridges, which might have been the best, as it explored human emotions other than terror.

But it’s a deeply flawed, overlong movie, worth watching for one performance — Denzel’s. Which makes it perfect Netflix material.

No bloggage today: I spent all my web time working. If you have something worth posting, feel free.

Let’s have a good week.

The Motor Trend Car of the Year spent the night at our house last night. I had to move it to allow our backyard crew to get their truck in. It kept tickling my butt, until I figured out it was trying to tell me I hadn’t fastened my seat belt. That is all. No, wait: Alan sure likes that Underground Garage show on the satellite radio. And that is all.

The backyard crew are the guys who were installing the fence, and they finished today. Woot. We now have a fenced yard, a patio and a shit-ton of bare topsoil, which I’m anticipating will be a winter-long headache until we can get something planted in the spring. The timing wasn’t perfect, but now the heavy lifting is done, we’ve reclaimed a chunk of the yard from concrete, ripped out the rotten deck, aka the Grosse Pointe Home for Dying Possums and Nasty-ass Raccoons, and set the stage for a nice entertaining space next year. Here’s something Alan found while ripping out the deck:

Click to enlarge, if you like. After puzzling over it for a while, we figured it was probably a cat. Large eye sockets, the fangs, suburbia — it’s unlikely to be anything more exotic. Although it was just a skull, which makes me wonder where the rest of kitty might have gone. Nature is red in tooth and claw, even when we’re drinking cocktails six inches over its head.

So, some quick bloggage:

What if Hallmark made a horror movie? The trailer would look like the one for Mitch Albom’s new book — er, new novel.

You’ve heard of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald? Here’s an account of a century-old gale of November on the Great Lakes that gives you an idea of how fearsome a “white hurricane” can be.

And now we have arrived at the weekend. Let’s make something good of it.

This is how the people who bought the newspaper I used to work for in Fort Wayne are running things now:

On their birthday, Fort Wayne journalists get a little — and I do mean little — gift from Fort Wayne Newspapers CEO Mike Christman: It’s a $1.25 vending machine token.

This is offered via a three-sentence email, one of which is “Happy birthday!” The token isn’t even delivered to your mail slot; you have to come down to HR to pick it up.

I’ve worked with some cheapskates in my life, but this might be a cake-taker. People will cut your pay, trim staff, fire staff and basically squeeze until the people left fully understand the new reality, and then? Flip ’em a few quarters and wish them a happy birthday. You can almost admire it.

My prediction: The management is hot on the trail of who leaked their birthday letter to Romenesko.

I don’t have much today, alas. It’s shaping up to be one of those weeks. But I do have some bloggage:

I’ve gotten back into the habit of checking in with Gin & Tacos regularly, and was struck by this piece. The writer, a college professor, notes:

Post-1980 America is a land in which it is impossible to engage in a discussion about a System with college-aged people without inevitably and almost immediately devolving into mini-soliloquies on Good and Bad choices. Why have so many kids? Why did he start drinking? And they signed a contract without reading the whole thing! Everyone knows not to do that.

This is what I mean when I describe college students, when I’m forced to generalize, as extremely conservative. They aren’t necessarily hardcore political conservatives in the context of Washington politics, but they have thoroughly internalized the message that their parents and the media have been hammering them with since birth: everything that happens to you is your fault. There are no innocent victims of anything. This is a coping mechanism / cognitive bias called the Just World Phenomenon, wherein people victim-blame as a means of coping with the random cruelty of the world. Rather than accept that horrible things happen to good people – and, thus, that a horrible fate could befall them at any moment – people choose to retreat into the comforts of believing that everyone Had It Coming.

I always call this “the distancing,” everyone does it, and the best you can do is be self-aware enough to know when it’s happening. There’s an element in it of the dust-up over Emily Yoffe’s rape-prevention advice. You saw it during Hurricane Katrina, where everything bad that happened in the Gulf of Mexico was because a) it was stupid to build a city there; and b) those people should have left anyway.

Anyway, an interesting observation.

I read this story in the Sunday NYT magazine, but I should have read it online, as the bells-and-whistles presentation of this account of international conflict in the South China Sea is truly remarkable. (Not recommended for slow connections or anyone using Internet Explorer 6, heh.) I was pretty outspoken in the ’80s and ’90s about not letting the design tail wag the content dog, but every so often it all comes together, and it’s worth the effort. If you want to know what longform journalism will be in the 21st century, look here.

Here’s a story by me; the tea party at the local-local level.

OK, I have to be off. Sorry for the late arrival. We’ll try to do better tomorrow.

Because I have a very modest public profile as a writer, I get a lot of social-media connection requests from people I don’t actually know. Over time, I’ve developed a general rule: I accept nearly all friend requests on Facebook, followers on Twitter, whatever the hell they call it on Google Plus. And then I wait, and see what happens — what people post, how they use the platform in general, whether they feel the need to have a screaming bald eagle as a profile picture. If I like what I see, or feel neutral about it, I generally keep them around. If I don’t, I either bump them down several notches on the ladder, “hide” or just unfriend them.

They have to be pretty bad to be unfriended, but I was in a tetchy mood the other day, and unfriended someone I probably should have kept around. (Mood: VERY tetchy, come to think of it.) I did it because I kept seeing baldly inaccurate political posts in my feed, and it was one of those fuckitlifestooshortforthiscrap things. This time, I actually read one post, and followed the links all the way back. Here’s how one went:

OBAMACARE WILL ALLOW GOVERNMENT AGENTS TO ENTER YOUR HOME! linked to a slightly less hysterical post saying the same thing, which linked to a HHS website, which outlined? Anyone? Yes, a visiting-nurse service for patients who have difficulty traveling to a doctor — brand-new mothers, the elderly, the carless, etc. Those are the government agents. Nurses.

(I allowed one of these jackbooted thugs into my home after Kate was born. She told me I had a cute baby, and that breastfeeding would get easier.)

It seemed to crystalize something I’ve become increasingly aware of: No one reads anything anymore. And the social-media business model has this as its cornerstone. Just keep clicking, sheeple. Click, like and comment! Retweet!

Earlier this week, during the discussion of Yoffe’s rape column, attention fell on this sentence: “Researchers such as Abbey and David Lisak have explored how these men use alcohol, instead of violence, to commit their crimes.” Now, a reader with a room-temperature IQ could understand what she was saying here: That these perpetrators don’t hold a gun to a woman’s head, but keep refilling her glass. Nevertheless, this was a typical comment: “Someone needs to tell Emily Yoffe ALL rape is violent,” followed by the amen chorale. Don’t read. Forget comprehension. Just react!

Miley Cyrus, a woman who hardly speaks in Zen koans, gave an interview to Rolling Stone where she mentioned Detroit, and Detroit being as parochial as any tank town, the local media picked it up. The passage in question:

Miley’s transformation from America’s sweetheart into whatever the hell she is now kicked into high gear three years ago, when she went to Detroit to shoot a movie called LOL. “Detroit’s where I felt like I really grew up,” she says. “It was only for a summer, but that’s where I started going to clubs, where I got my first tattoo. Well, not my first tattoo, but my first without my mom’s consent. I got it on 8 Mile! I lied to the guy and told him I was 18. I got a heart on my finger and wore a Band-Aid for two months so my mom wouldn’t find out.”

Which a local TV station tacked onto a blatant traffic grab:

Miley Cyrus says she grew up in Detroit. How does that make you feel?…

Which prompted the usual responses, which ranged from “stupid bitch” to “she’s a liar.” And so a vapid pop star’s pedestrian observation on how she came of age was twisted into her somehow lying about an upbringing that’s been in every celebrity magazine in America, including Rolling Stone.

Nobody reads anything. Except you, of course. You’re reading this, and you understand it. Bless your heart.

So, bloggage:

This story cries out for satire, and maybe TBogg is up to the task, but man, just read this stuff:

James Hancock wanted to meet a woman who shared his core values. But when you’re a strict Objectivist, it can be a little tricky.

So he found a dating site catering to Ayn Rand aficionados. And he found one, and now they have…well, I guess you’d call it a marriage:

They now live with their 3-year-old daughter in North Walpole, N.H. Their dog, Frisco, is named for Francisco d’Anconia, the mining tycoon in “Atlas Shrugged.”

…Mr. Hancock says the couple’s shared Objectivist values ensure familial harmony. If their daughter doesn’t want to brush her teeth, they both agree that she has to do it. “There’s no back-and-forth or ‘well, just let her do it this one time,’ ” he says. “We know that if we don’t do this now, it’ll be worse later. So that’s logic and reason instead of just emotion and inconvenience.”

I don’t know how I missed Motivational Biden until now:

My new favorite person to see Tom & Lorenzo pick on is Allison Williams, daughter of Brian, co-star of “Girls.” She cultivates a sort of classic American/thoroughbred style that frequently comes across as boring. Or, as T-Lo put it, “She looks like a Chief of Surgery’s wife attending a hospital benefit.”

Attend the benefit of your choice this weekend, because it’s HERE.

OK, so I have to wonder if I’ve got some sort of tone-deaf thing going on here. You reality-check me:

Emily Yoffe wrote a column for Slate yesterday that I thought made sense, if via a stupid headline. College women: Stop getting drunk isn’t precisely what she was saying. Rather, to stop getting so drunk they are literally incapacitated. To stop binge drinking. To protect their bodies the same way they’d protect anything valuable — with prudence and common sense.

Well. It had hardly hit the floor before the outrage began, most of which boiled down to why not tell men not to rape, Emily? Huh? Why not start with the perpetrators? Sure. Because that totally works. So hey, men! Stop raping women. There were also the usual comments about Saudi Arabia and victim-blaming and stuff like this and stuff like that.

Meanwhile, I found passages like this:

Let’s be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice. But we are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them. Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.

…and this:

“I’m always feeling defensive that my main advice is: ‘Protect yourself. Don’t make yourself vulnerable to the point of losing your cognitive faculties,’ ” says Anne Coughlin, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, who has written on rape and teaches feminist jurisprudence. She adds that by not telling them the truth—that they are responsible for keeping their wits about them—she worries that we are “infantilizing women.”

…and this:

“I’m not saying a woman is responsible for being sexually victimized,” says Christopher Krebs, one of the authors of that study and others on campus sexual assault. “But when your judgment is compromised, your risk is elevated of having sexual violence perpetrated against you.”

…made it pretty clear: If you’re assaulted while you’re drunk it’s not your fault. But why not improve your odds of not being assaulted?

Every so often we have a crime wave here in Grosse Pointe, where thieves target unlocked cars parked on the street and steal whatever they can. Sometimes they break windows to get in, but more often they’re looking for people who’ve left things unsecured. Of course, these thieves shouldn’t be entering cars. Unfortunately, they do. Locking your car improves your odds of being left alone.

So my question is: What am I reading wrong here? Anyone care to give it a shot? I have to send these things out for feedback from time to time, because I’m aware that, sitting alone in my little home office all day, I might, technically, be going mad.

Hope I’m not.

Today was sunny and mild, but by late afternoon cloudy, overcast and en route to Autumn in Earnest. Pizza for lunch, a few chocolate-covered peanuts for dessert, a nice catch-up with a former colleague, to whom I gave our American Girl dolls and associated stuff. My goal is to get as much crap out of the house by the new year, whether through donation, sale or dragging it to the curb. I get these bouts once in a while, but this one I’m following through on. The vast crap reduction project is a go.

Bloggage? Don’t got none today — I’m watching those Tigers. There are about 50 zillion stories to read about the last of the shutdown, and I should probably start making my way through ’em.

Arguing with a writer over what he should have written sort of defines “pointless.” That’s one reason I hold the speech-he-should-have-given column trope in low regard. And when we’re talking about Mitch Albom? That’s like Wendy barking at the mailman. The mail will arrive tomorrow. Sorry, Wendy.

But I have to say, this column — which, as bad Mitch columns go, is far from the worst — left me a little fish-mouthed for a while. The gist: Mitch is taking some time off in the midst of the biggest local sports story of the year to tend his charity in Haiti, where he and some of his volunteers watched game two of the American League Championship Series via laptop.

I think of what a talented writer, a Jon Carroll or Pete Dexter or Steve Lopez, could do with that material. It’s rich with possibilities — the contrast between grinding poverty and the luxurious details of American baseball; the tiny-planet angle, the weirdness of the game being beamed down into this dark spot on the map, under the eternal, indifferent stars; or maybe Mitch, well-established as a hater of computers and the internet, might admit to some second thoughts about his prejudices. Hell, give me enough time and I could think of a dozen more approaches that might turn this unusual occurrence into something people once looked to columnists to provide, a simple moment that illuminates an eternal truth, or just a good story, well-told.

Or, y’know, whatever.

But no. First comes self-promotion:

Many will remember where they were for the game. I will never forget. We had taken a crew of 23 volunteers — plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. — to aid in the reconstruction of the Have Faith Haiti Mission, run by a charity I helped start…

Next comes log-rolling:

Normally, we give up on the outside world. We have made these trips before (seven of them, thanks to Roger Penske and Pentastar Aviation, who donate the use of a plane).

Then comes more than a dozen paragraphs of the Hey, Didya See That Game school of sportswriting, where Mitch relates the key events in a contest already 48 hours old, then records his friends’ insightful responses: “Yes!” “Scherzer has this.” “It’s Detroit’s night.” Every so often, it’s like he rouses himself enough to remember yeah, right, the dateline on this sucker is Port-au-Prince and offers a detail:

I noticed a small lizard dart across the wall.

But there’s drama, oh yes there is, as when the laptop crashes at a key moment, but comes back in time to record David Ortiz’ grand slam, after which Mitch reveals the sort of sports acumen that justifies his salary — I knew it was over — and calls it a night.

Ladies and gentlemen, remember to tip your waitresses. The mailman has been driven from the door yet again.

On to the bloggage, then:

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the confederate flag-wavers in front of the White House Sunday:

It is the wisdom of the crowd that matters. The wisdom that marked Sunday’s crowd was the idea that the president “bows down to Allah” and needs to “put the Qu’ran down.” The wisdom that marked Sunday’s crowd was the notion that Obama was not the president of “the people” but the president of “his people.” The wisdom of Sunday’s crowd held that the police, doing their job, looked “like something out of Kenya.” It’s not so much that a man would fly a Confederate flag, as Jeff Goldberg notes, in front of the home of a black family. It’s that a crowd would allow him the comfort of doing it.

Three episodes in, it’s pretty clear that “Homeland” has jumped the shark. But it was fun to see Erik Dellums back in the saddle.

Rielle Hunter is sorry. So very, very sorry. And coincidentally (I’m sure), she has a new book out this week.

Wednesday dawns, the week advances, and we’re all 24 hours older.

The breaks on the local “Morning Edition” used to contain a segment where the host would interview a staffer about what was hopping on Twitter that morning. (It still may, for all I know, but I only listened to “Morning Edition” on my trips to Lansing, and I rarely go these days.) I don’t know if it had something to do with the staffer’s youthful voice or what, but this segment always chapped my ass. It had something to do with the nomenclature, maybe?

“People are talking about Flag Day a lot today,” she’d report, and my teeth would clench. “People?” Could we be just a little more specific? On the other hand, “tweeters” would be even worse, and finally, I’d think: Who fucking cares what’s trending on Twitter? The whole thing reminded me of the endless meetings throughout my newspaper career, about how we might attract younger readers. The answer was always the same: Pop music coverage! Even little Fort Wayne had a pop-music writer (for a while, anyway). It didn’t work.

I thought of that the other day when I was navigating the Free Press website, where a full-on push to video is well underway, and you can no longer get the weather forecast unless you’re willing to watch a video. This was a piece on the reaction to the new Miss America, who is of Indian descent, and whose victory was apparently objected to be some of these people. The segment, which I can’t find a day later, featured a reporter in front of a strangely minimalist backdrop, again quoting people who tweeted mean things about the new Miss A. But some people were supportive, she added, true to journalistic form. And so two minutes of my life went trickling down the drain.

This has been one of those weeks for news, when Twitter became a place to go for news, only most of it was wrong.

I’m so old — how old are you? — I’m so old that I remember one of my college classmates reporting on the standard at the Associated Press, where he was working an intern-ish first job, far away in Montana: When in doubt, leave it out. If you weren’t absolutely sure of a fact, you didn’t put it in a story.

What a concept. I’ve been told that viewers today will forgive early errors on a breaking-news story, as long as they’re promptly corrected, but speaking just as one news consumer? I’m not having it anymore. I stayed away from the coverage of the Naval Yard shooting until late in the day, hoping the facts would assert themselves within a few hours. Yesterday, I went to bed believing the gunman had wielded an AR-15 rifle and had been generally discharged from the Navy. Wrong. I guess in the future, I’ll have to wait two days.

Early in the comments yesterday, a few of you were talking about particular news events, which by general consensus are reported differently by traditional media outlets. Suicides, for one — newspapers don’t report them unless they happen in spectacular ways. If a jumper from the top deck of a parking garage lands in the middle of rush-hour traffic, for example. If the suicide is famous. A few other circumstances. But generally, we know that suicides reported in the media can encourage potential suicides into taking the step. So we don’t.

Bomb threats, for another. Bomb threats beget bomb threats, and nearly all of them are empty, so? Don’t report them.

I’m starting to think racist-tweet stories — and most stories — should go into this category, too. I know I mentioned a racist-tweet story yesterday, but I’m thinking racist tweets aren’t news. I’m thinking racist tweets — all tweets — are just a reflection of the vast and imperfect human family, and hence? Not news.

We really need to figure out how we’re going to cover these stories in the future. Breaking news is exciting, until it isn’t. Like eating potato chips. But news isn’t potato chips.

So. Let’s cut this short and get to some good bloggage:

A great interview with Linda Rondstadt in the San Francisco Chronicle. As you’ve probably heard, she can no longer sing. But she can talk, and she has a lot to say:

She stays in touch, mostly by phone, with a wide range of friends from her musical career. They include the singers Jackson Browne and Aaron Neville, songwriter Jimmy Webb and her longtime recording engineer, George Massenburg. “There’s a certain kind of intimacy that happens when you spend so much time polishing a phrase or a harmony part with someone,” she reflected, “that never goes away. I feel a special kind of kinship that’s different from my other friends, even if it doesn’t necessarily move into your daily life. They may be living somewhere else and you hardly ever see them. But you can just pick up right where you left off. It’s almost like love. No, it is love.”

I love people who are that unguarded.

Remember when Jeff said something about the Insane Clown Posse, something about how they call themselves family, and just like real family, they can do horrible things to one another? They were right. Gawker has the actual complaint. It’s awful. What white trash these creatures be.

It’s Wednesday! Halfway through the week. Enjoy it.

I’ve grown fond of Neil Steinberg’s blog, partly because of its spectacular name: Every Goddamn Day. I sometimes wonder if newspapers might fare better if they’d change their names to hew closer to the best of the internets — your Balloon Juices and Gin and Tacos and Self-Styled Sirens. I should change this blog’s name, but I lack the imagination to come up with anything very good. Every Goddamn Day is taken. And I have no intention of posting every goddamn day; five days a week is plenty, thank you very much.

Anyway, Tuesday’s entry, Calvin Klein’s plywood house, was one of my faves so far, as it formed a little community around the relative handful of people who read Jacob Bernstein’s piece in the Sunday New York Times, about Calvin’s new house in Southampton, and basically said WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK.

Bernstein, you journos probably already know, is the son of the late Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein, and appears to specialize in trolling readers. His July profile of Caroline Kennedy was particularly sick-making, and this sort of adoring tongue bath for Calvin Klein mainly tells me that whatever his mother gave him, she didn’t give him her gimlet eye for bullshit.

Steinberg notes that Bernstein saves this amazing revelation about the $70 million Klein summer house for the 30th paragraph:

After that, a life-size mock-up of the two story house was built of plywood on the property. That project was so substantial that it required a building permit from the Village of Southampton and wound up costing approximately $350,000, according to two sources close to Mr. Klein. So that Mr. Klein could get an even better idea of what it was to be like, the furniture he had in mind was created of foamcore.

This house was such a dog and pony show that he spent $350,000 on a full-scale model, complete with fake furniture, before he actually built the house. Steinberg notes:

That’s a big drawback of being rich, I believe—I’m guessing here, but I feel fairly confident. Wealth gives you the illusion that you can have everything Just So, everything to your liking, all the time, and allows you to go to ridiculous lengths to try to get it. Not to take anything away from Calvin Klein. As a young man, I owned one of his bomber jackets and was immensely proud to have it. And now, his boxers and undershirts—just the best. Wouldn’t wear another brand; nothing else will do. So he earned his money, and if he feels compelled to spend it in such a patently crazy, controlling and almost sad fashion, well, there you go. If I read of the plywood dry run house in a Christopher Buckley novel I’d smile, shake my head and think that Buckley had gone a bit over-the-top, and strayed into overbroad parody. That it is instead a factual occurrence is a matter of wonder, and deserves the widest possible dissemination.

Yeah.

He’s been on a roll of late. I thought this piece about Charlie Trotter, the celebrity chef currently delaminating somewhere in Chicago, was very fine.

And while we’re taking Chicago Columnists for $1,000, Alex, here’s Eric Zorn on the sorts of people who sucked lemons when Diana Nyad emerged from the Florida straits:

I left it to others to sound the note of bitterness: “I would love to accomplish my dreams too,” as a CNN.com commenter put it, “but a thing called working always seems to interfere with that goal.”

Meanwhile, over at the Atlantic, there was a photoblog of Burning Man. Someday my kid is going to want to go to this thing, and I guess there won’t be much I’ll be able to say about it. I’ll do like Frances McDormand in “Almost Famous” — DON’T TAKE DRUGS!

I’m writing a story, and as usual it is draining me, so not too much more today, sorry. It’ll be a lovely day today, though — enjoy it.

Man, am I beat, and I’m not sure I know why. No, I do: 85 degrees, rain allegedly on the way but probably not. I love sun and summer as much as anyone, but a little cool breeze would be welcome right now.

On the other hand? Still summer.

I do feel like I’m a little empty after all the Leonard stuff, and so, let’s just go with some linkage, which has been piling up in the last couple of days.

A big talker around here today, still shocking to consider: There are an estimated tens of thousands of stray dogs in Detroit. The shelters can’t hold them all, the police can’t deal and in the midst of all this misery you can still find wonderful details like this passage:

Aggressive dogs force the U.S. Postal Service to temporarily halt mail delivery in some neighborhoods, said Ed Moore, a Detroit-area spokesman. He said there were 25 reports of mail carriers bitten by dogs in Detroit from October through July. Though most are by pets at homes, strays have also attacked, Moore said.

“It’s been a persistent problem,” he said.

Mail carrier Catherine Guzik told of using pepper spray on swarms of tiny, ferocious dogs in a southwest Detroit neighborhood.

“It’s like Chihuahuaville,” Guzik said as she walked her route.

Chihuahuaville!

Meanwhile in animal news, The Chronicle of the Horse has been sold, and the staff is not pleased. And while I know you don’t care, I thought this passage was funny:

Since Bellissimo, 51, purchased the Chronicle in mid-July, readers have been venting in the magazine’s online forum, a kind of country club for mannered and fanatical horse enthusiasts. To even register as a commenter, one must answer trivia questions like: “If Mr. Ed was an off-the-track Thoroughbred, we might have seen one of these when he was flapping his lips with Wilbur.” (Answer: Tattoo.) Or: “If the farrier shoes three geldings in front and trims four more, how many shoes does the farrier need?” (Answer: Six.)

Dogs? Animals? WENDY. Playing the crabapple game:

And if you missed the late comments yesterday, our own LAMary, playing “The Weakest Link” some time back:

Now, however, I have to go drink some wine. It’s feeling like medicine right now.